In the past five years, coal power made up over two-thirds of capacity additions in India's generation, and currently accounts for more than 60 per cent of India's power capacity. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), India's coal demand will see the biggest growth over the next five years, despite a global slowdown.

In order to meet the coal demand in next five years, Coal India Ltd, the main coal producer, has an ambitious plan of increasing its production to one billon tonnes by FY2019-20. CIL's production is showing an increasing trend, having gone up from 494 Mt in FY15 to 554 Mt in FY17.

Just think of power going off while an important surgery is taking place in a hospital and it will not get back for a day or two. The kind of disruption an electricity blackout arising from grid collapse can cause is enormous for different people at various places. Grid collapse is the worst-case scenario for any transmission utility too.

India Power Corporation Ltd. (IPCL), formerly known as DPSC Limited, incorporated in 1919, is set to become India´s leading power generation and utility company. The company has actively forayed into a diversified portfolio, with renewable and conventional modes of power generation, distribution and power trading.

Smart grid is an evolving set of technologies, working together to improve the present grid, the applications for which depend on the location and the requirements. By enabling intelligent monitoring, control, communication, and self-healing technologies, it facilitates better power connection; information exchange; reduces environmental impact; and delivers enhanced reliability and security of power supply.

For several decades now, the power sector has focused its activity on the augmentation of its generation capacity in order to cope with burgeoning demand. So far, all eggs have been going into the production basket. However, it now seems that a vital link in this ecosystem has been largely ignored: that is, addressing our inadequate power evacuation infrastructure. This is the Achilles´ heel of the Indian power sector.

Currently in India, the Ministry of Power (MoP) has decided to develop smart grid in stages by taking up pilot smart grid projects. MoP set up the India Smart Grid Task Force (ISGTF) and India Smart Grid Forum (ISGF) to help prepare a roadmap for smart grid rollout and 14 smart grid pilots were approved for execution

The power sector of the country seems to be full of contradictions - there are about 300 million people who do not have access to power, about a third of the population is not lucky enough to escape scheduled and unscheduled power outages, but about 25,000 MW of installed capacity is unable to find buyers, the reason is that most of the power distribution companies (Discoms) are unable to buy enough power to cater their customers´ needs and even if they are ready to do so, there are not enough transmission lines to transfer excess power from pockets of plenty to the needy geographies.